Really lady at the park? Really?

So today SO and I decided to take our DS to the park to see how he liked the swings. He loved them, and the slide that his daddy took him on, that's not the point of my post though. When we first got there we pulled into a parking space and sat in the car eating our lunch since it was doubling as DS's playtime and SO's lunch time. Across from us there was a row of portapotties and a woman with two young girls, I'm assuming they were her daughters but then again how would I know. Anyway one of the girls had to go to the bathroom so her mother walks into one of the portapotties with her and shuts the door! She was in there for a good two minutes while her younger daughter sat in the stroller outside! SO and I could not believe what we were seeing. I mean that lady didn't know us, we could have been kidnappers for all she knew (we're not, but she didn't know that) and she knew we were there since we pulled up right as they got to the portapotties. I'm just floored that with all the things we see on the news about young children being abducted that someone would think it was okay to leave a young child anywhere in a public (and very large) park by themselves. I know she wasn't far from her but she couldn't see her and horrible things happen and can happen in the blink of an eye. I just couldn't believe it.

Comments (82)

Statistics are great and all but it only takes one time to never forgive myself...you do the best you can as a mom and even if its one in a million I certainly don't want to be that one. SIDS is a possibility of course but not in my control if I try to put my child down per guidelines...I do have control over not watching her in public.

Did you know that, despite news reports, Halloween is statistically the safest night of the year? And that it's because it's the night when kids are surrounded by the most people, most of whom are strangers?

I would suggest you famililarize yourself with your local crime statistics. Judging how safe you are by looking at the number of times a news organization reports a child in distress or danger is basically guaranteed to push you as far as you'll let it into the range of paranoid shut-in, and it's worse for how it'll make you interact with your kids. They need to learn to take care of themselves, which is *impossible* if you don't start small. Are you saying you'd rather be suspected of being a kidnapper and molester everywhere you go? Are you okay with your husband getting a police record when he walks your kid to school and a "caring" neighbor calls the cops, because these days we're terrified of men who are in the vicinity of kids?

The best defense against the dangers you're worried about are to be informed about them--really informed, not just overloaded with scary factoids, which is extremely difficult in our current culture--and start practicing reasonable safety measures and teaching them to your kids. Which, in my opinion, does not include teaching the older girl that she should learn to be okay with leaving the door open when she goes to the bathroom in public for any reason. I don't care if it's just cracked; it's an incredible violation of her sense of privacy to disallow her from closing the door. So if that means that the mother is on the other side of a closed door from the baby, when there are other people around acting normal and communal in a neighborhood park in the middle of the day, then where's the danger?